THE STORY TELLER
Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by Helen Lane
New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1989
246 pp. $17.95
Some readers believe that immortality is attached to the work of art. For them the history of literature should not be the history of the authors and the accidents of their careers, but rather the history of their works. Others disagree and glorify the literary creators and not their works; immortality for them goes to the person, not the title. This latter group does not judge a book as an independent unit but as part of a lifetime achievement, and while good books are indeed the product of true genius, a genius, this group avows, is not born with an innate disposition or a written fate but with a prolonged and stubborn effort.
While commenting in 1980 on Mosquitoes, Faulkner's second novel, Mario Vargas Llosa pointed to the weaknesses of the plot and its boring prose but compared its author to Cervantes, Tolstoy, and Shakespeare "because of the intense, diversified and profound oeuvre he managed to create." Vargas Llosa, hence, falls into the second group of readers: For him every good actor has a bad night and every good writer a bad book. Faulkner, he persuades us in his review, ought to be seen as a true genius, and Mosquitoes as a foundation, a book foreshadowing the masterful art yet to come from the writer's pen.
One could now apply the same judgment to Vargas Llosa: his three latest books, the one under review, Who Killed Palomino Molero? (1986), and Elegy to the Stepmother (1988), are poorly written and lack narrative power. Yet its author is far from a newcomer--he is a successful Latin American prosist who may be haunted by these titles as by a persistent bad dream.
Artistic gore
In the late sixties and seventies, critics and readers were enchanted with Vargas Llosa's arresting talent and considered him a genius. Conversation in The Cathedral (1969), with its many dialogues taking place on multiple temporal levels and its interweaving parallel stories placed in different regions and time periods, was prized as a masterpiece. And so were The Time of the Hero (1963), and The Green House (1966), both beautiful literary murals that transcended the writer's frustration and contempt for his native Peru because they expressed how bad politics and military corruption had destroyed the nation's redemptive dreams. Although the Peru described in those pages was unknown to many in Europe or the United States, Vargas Llosa's pen was able to transform the setting into a compelling and exotic stage where universal characters could perform.
In the twentieth century, Peru has had occasional periods of political and economic progress, but for the most part instability ruled. Vargas Llosa's novels portray almost every segment of his native society, and their uncanny unfolding resembles the fluvial webs of a river which branch into multiple streams. "Every aspect of our individual and social existence, its dreams, routine and trivia, deserves to be included in our novels," he wrote once. Thus, not without reason the critic Luis Harss, author of the landmark 1966 book Into the Mainstream, perceives him as a "social novelist"--not only because of the vast public screen on
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